Doctoral Dissertation Research: Juvenile Drug Courts: An Ethnographic View of the Interagency Collaboration and Client Perceptions of the Court Intervention

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

The juvenile drug court is one of many recent attempts to change how the juvenile justice system considers the youth within the greater context of his family and community. Based on adult drug courts that started in the United States in the late 1980s, a juvenile drug court diverts juvenile offenders with substance abuse problems into drug treatment instead of traditional probation. Very little empirical research has been done on juvenile drug courts due their recent entry on the juvenile justice scene. This gap in research leaves unanswered many questions about the basic operation and decision-making processes characteristic of these courts such as: what kinds of tensions and conflict arise in the routine functioning of such inter-agency treatment programs? What are the key points of discretionary decision-making in these programs? What community and organizational factors influence the decision junctures and outcomes? What is the impact of the program on youth clients over time? To answer those questions, this project will look at the youth clients' institutional careers -- the stages a client moves through within a program and the array of outcomes available at various points in time. The project will use qualitative methods of ethnography (participant observation and interviews) and conversation analysis, following 30 youth in a juvenile drug court program for 12 months to obtain a naturalistic account of the process. In short, the project will create institutional "road maps" of each client to see if there are parallels, inconsistencies or contingencies marking critical decisions and junctures for different clients. The project objective is twofold: the first is to dissect the court's decision-making process, identifying the factors involved in that process and detecting variations among clients' institutional careers. The second is to pay particular attention to how youth clients and their parents become consumers of this process and the ways in which they try to shape the staff's decision-making process.